HEAVEN’S GATE

(1980) When the handlebar-mustachioed fatcats of the Wyoming Cattleman’s Association send a horde of hired guns, including Christopher Walken, to drive immigrant squatters off their land, federal marshal Kris Kristofferson does his best to avert the seemingly inevitable My Lai-like massacre — both men taking time out for visits with Isabelle Huppert’s frontier prostitute. Following his Deer Hunter Oscar triumph, wunderkind director Michael Cimino was handed both a lucrative contract for his next project — his own heavily fictionalized screenplay on the historical Johnson County Wars — and the coveted “final cut,” a clause the studio would later regret when the picture went 400% over budget. When Heaven’s Gate opened in November, 1980, critics got in line to deliver brutal body slams. Withdrawn after only a week, it reappeared four months later shorn of over an hour. Even post-press-furor, the public still stayed away and Gate recovered only $1.5 million of its $44 million budget. In Europe, far from the anti-Cimino hysteria, critics praised the longer version as a masterpiece and made it a cause célèbre — its critical support has swelled to even greater heights with the recent unveiling of this new restoration (supervised by Cimino) at the Venice Film Festival. Approx. 216 min. DCP.

A PARK CIRCUS RELEASE OF AN MGM FILM 

REVIEWS

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“A MASTERPIECE! A majestic and lovingly detailed Western which simultaneously celebrates and undermines the myth of the American frontier.”
– Time Out (London)

“Like an opium vision of American bloodshed, re-creating and ballooning the Johnson County Wars into a self-mythologizing prophecy of corporate mercilessness. Vilmos Zsigmond’s mistily gorgeous cinematography is virtually an act of mourning in and of itself.”
– Michael Atkinson, Village Voice

“Heaven’s Gate arrived during an era of particularly vicious American westerns... While ugliness defined and revived the genre in the 1970s, Heaven’s Gate represented a slight return to classicism — to larger-than-life Panavision spectacle and crane shot-managed majesty.”
– Joseph Jon Lanthier, Slant